This one is neat – a new EyeTracking Study verifies the importance of page position and rank in both Organic and PPC search results for visibility and click through in Google.

The first phase of the study was conducted with 50 people in Eyetools’ eye tracking lab in San Francisco, California and presented panel participants with 5 distinct scenarios that would require the use of a search engine. Google was used as the search engine in all of the instances.

This is the measured organic Ranking Visibility (shown in a percentage of participants looking at a listing in this location)

Rank 1 – 100%

Rank 2 – 100%

Rank 3 – 100%

Rank 4 – 85%

Rank 5 – 60%

Rank 6 – 50%

Rank 7 – 50%

Rank 8 – 30%

Rank 9 – 30%

Rank 10 – 20%

You can also check the full size picture

What I find especially intersting is, that the top Google Adsense ad still receives 50% of the eyes, while the bottom ad get's 10 onyl…

in Other words: a TOP Adwords ranking buys you a guaranted SERP at position 6 or 7…. not too bad…

but then nothing REALLY unexpected… the whole study had 50 people analysed, but the study is still going on… watch out for future results.